BobB-nw writes: Adobe's Flash program is being used on heavily trafficked Web sites to collect information on how people navigate those sites even if people believe they've restricted the data collection, according to a new study by researchers from UC Berkeley and several other schools. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1446862 The study comes as the U.S. government is evaluating how it uses cookies on its own Web sites. Adobe's Flash program plug-in, which is used to view multimedia content and is installed on millions of computers worldwide, also stores cookies for user preferences such as the volume level of a video, wrote the researchers. The Flash cookie in some cases will recreate, or "respawn" cookies, jeopardizing the privacy the user had attempted to preserve. Many of the top 100 Web sites will respawn HTTP cookies, the researchers wrote.